More on Affordable Housing

The third and final installment of the Philadelphia Inquirer series: "A longer wait for housing: For the poor, new units aren't nearly enough" by Larry Eichel, is online, with links to the previous articles in the series. From the summary:

The recent transformation of public housing in Philadelphia has been good for the people who live in the new developments, good for the surrounding neighborhoods, good for the look and feel of the city. But the move to suburban-style homes and apartments has not benefited many of the city's lowest-income residents.

Christopher Myers, Baltimore City Paper. LOCKED OUT: Lisa Blunt says that she and other former residents of Uplands Apartment complex were forced to accept substandard housing after they were kicked out of their apartments by the city and HUD.

And because I am behind in my reading of the Baltimore Sun, I just came across this article on the Uplands development, "A thousand new homes for Southwest Baltimore," which will replace a low income housing complex with new housing for as much as $400,000/unit, although there is a legal challenge to the project, because while demolishing 900 apartments, there were few provisions for providing much in the way of affordable housing. From the article:

As the planning has gone forward, so has a legal challenge of the Uplands redevelopment, filed in federal court in 2003 by former tenants of the abandoned low-income Uplands apartments who contended that the housing proposed for the site is too expensive to allow them to return. Last year, a federal judge asked HUD officials to reconsider the fair-housing implications of its deal to sell the property to the city. Since then, lawyers for HUD, the city and former Uplands tenants have been in extended talks on that issue. Last week, there were reports that a settlement including provisions for moderate-income housing was near.

See this related article from the Baltimore City Paper, "Right of Return: Displaced Uplands Tenants Demand Return to Former Homes." And this page from the Baltimore Housing Authority website includes a link to the 78 page master plan for the development.

Index Keywords: affordable-housing, neighborhood-revitalization